UnitedLinux held a telephone party yesterday to announce new general manager Paula Hunter and talk about its open beta release. Lots of curious journalists showed up. The question-askers all had a cynical air about them, and yet UnitedLinux bigwigs didn't seem surprised by the grilling. The underlying question still: what will UnitedLinux mean in the big picture that is Linux business? Our question: what about the GPL? (Also inside, an open letter to the UnitedLinux group from the FSF.)

BT is to spend a whopping £33m over the next couple of weeks in a bid to double the take-up of broadband in the UK. From Sunday the monster telco is to spend £1m a day in a ten-day nation-wide TV campaign to plug broadband.

ProComp, the Sun-, Oracle- and usual suspects-backed lobbying group set up to push for tougher measures against Microsoft, has launched an attack on WinXP SP1 and Win2k SP3, saying they contain clear violations of the MS-DoJ proposed antitrust settlement terms they're claimed by Microsoft to comply with. That is not of course to say that ProComp would be happy with those terms even if the Service Packs did meet them - it would not - but it has taken the opportunity to send an extended and reasonably well-researched 'told you so' to the DoJ, listing six claimed violations, and it intimates that its study of Microsoft's API disclosure procedures will follow shortly.

LCD desktop monitor sales in Europe fell for the first quarter ever in Q2 this year. Two quarters of consecutive price rises proved too much for the already weak PC market to bear it seems - In France, Spain and the UK, LCD market share compared with CRTs actually fell in Q2.

Motorola has plugged one source of the leak that saw most of next year's GSM handsets spill on to the web over the weekend. But a Czech site still appears to have chapter and verse, and includes some information that Howards didn't publish.

Microsoft has alerted the world+dog to a trio of vulns in its implementation of Java Virtual Machine. The most serious enables an attacker to gain "complete control" over a victim's system. So get patching now.

What are we to make of Sun's Linux Desktop announcement? We inadvertently provided the answer ourselves talking to Sun executives yesterday. What a good idea it is, we mused, to revive the vendor show: the press arrives in droves, and for a few hours at least, you have their undivided attention.